How to remove broken packages?

[DaCalebMan]

Hey guys,

I have had this annoying adobe flash package that appears to be seriously broken, and won't reinstall, or uninstall. By the looks of it it's part doing it's job. It plays sound, and when you scroll the window out of view it switches a frame.

Still, I really need to get rid of it. anyone know how?
I tried ap-get, aptitude, update manager,
synaptic, and even add/or remove.
___________
Please help!
~Caleb

[teenytinylinuxgrl]

If you're using 9.04, there's a new application called Computer Janitor that might do the job for you.

Amy

[DaCalebMan]

Hey Amy,

Thanks for the suggestion, I tried out Computer Janitor, but it returned an error
(see screen-shot) Luckily it gave a clue to where the broken package is, so I could probably go to that directory and delete it.

Thanks anyway!
~Caleb

[reed9]

How did you install flash? Via the package manager, or manually?

[D-cat]

dpkg is the underlying package manager, do not delete that file; it would break apt and all other related interfaces (like synaptic).

What we need to do is find out what you have installed for flash and where the files are.

sudo find / | grep libflashplayer.so

Also open a new tab or window in firefox and type about:plugins in the address bar.

Look for the (Shockwave) Flash Player section, it'll look something like this... we need to know if it's enabled and what version.

Shockwave Flash

    File name: libflashplayer.so
    Shockwave Flash 10.0 r22

MIME Type 	                Description         Suffixes 	Enabled
application/x-shockwave-flash 	Shockwave Flash 	swf 	Yes
application/futuresplash 	FutureSplash Player 	spl 	Yes

[DaCalebMan]

sudo find / | grep libflashplayer.so:
/root/.local/share/Trash/files/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so

Shockwave Flash

    File name: libswfdecmozilla.so
    Shockwave Flash 9.0 r999

MIME Type 	Description 	Suffixes 	Enabled
application/x-shockwave-flash 	Adobe Flash movie 	swf 	Yes
application/futuresplash 	FutureSplash movie 	spl 	Yes

I tried to install the deb package of Adobe flash 10, and when the installation failed I tried to uninstall it in synaptic, apt-get, aptitude, dpkg, add/remove, and even manually uninstalling.

[reed9]

Try

su -
apt-get install -f

Also, libswfdecmozilla is the open source swfdec flash player. Sadly, it still doesn't work to well, at least in my experience, and also, it will interfere and cause problems if you have the adobe flash plugin installed. So I recommend uninstalling it.

[D-cat]

I was starting and got inturrupted:

You're using the open source flash player. Look for the swfdec packages and remove them.
Then install ubuntu-restricted-extras (or if you did already did, then the flashplugin-nonfree). This can be done in Synaptic.